Guarini Global Law & Tech Director of Policy and Practice and Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU Law Angelina Fisher participated in a webinar with Alexandra Doyle (Consultant Poverty and Social Protection, Oxford Policy Management), Rodrigo Ortiz D'avila Assumpcao (Social Protection Management Information Systems Specialist, ILO), and Jonathan Marskell (Senior Program Officer, Identification for Development (ID4D) Initiative, World Bank) that was moderated by Saurav Bhattarai (Social Protection Innovation and Learning (SPIL), GIZ).
A recording and further details are available below.
Governments globally have turned to social protection systems to respond to the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis laid bare the exclusion of many segments of the population from social protection programmes and the need to invest in universal, comprehensive, sustainable, and resilient systems. Responses to the pandemic, many unprecedented in their scale and speed, have led to significant operating innovations, especially regarding the use of digital technologies for the identification and registration of the recipients of social protection programmes. Some of the most remarkable innovations range from information exchange and the use of administrative records to registration on web portals and mobile phones.
The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), on behalf of German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), in the past has created many spaces for policy makers and practitioners to reflect on the many creative and innovative digital solutions that have been deployed over the past two years in the COVID-19 response. Now it is time to discuss how these innovations can be adapted and incorporated into the delivery of routine and, if appropriate, shock-responsive social protection programming; and move towards a shared understanding of digital social protection and investments in foundational systems in different country contexts.
In this webinar, the organizers sought to bring together key takeaways from the COVID-19 response and implications for the future. To set the scene, the webinar began with a framing presentation that provided an overview of some of the high-level trends globally focusing on digital innovation during the COVID-19 social protection response, particularly in relation to registration and enrolment, and key implications. This was followed by short presentations by sectoral experts to report on their lessons from COVID-19 as well as their suggestions to prepare for future shocks and make social protection systems more adaptive.
This was the fourth session in the "ASPects – Practice Exchange on ASP" series and within this framework is particularly related to Building Block 4 “Data & information systems” of the WB’s Adaptive Social Protection framework. These webinars are dedicated to bringing together practitioners, leading experts, and policy makers to share and exchange perspectives on Adaptive Social Protection (ASP). Each webinar within the series will focus on specific practically relevant aspects of one related ASP Building Block (Institutional arrangements and partnerships - Programs - Data and information - Finance). The series, organised by the GIZ Global Program Social Protection Innovation and Learning (SPIL) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in cooperation with socialprotection.org and other partners, aims at informing the global public policy dialogue on building back better systems and better preparedness for future shocks.
